The flame of his
literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by
the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife
died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health,
public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill
penury could not repress his noble rage. He was always planning and
writing new novels, even when he had no place to lay his head. And the
bodily distress of poverty did not cut him nearly so sharply as its
shame. His letters prove clearly that at times he suffered in the same
way as the pitiable hero of "Poor Folk." That book was indeed a
prophecy of the author's own life.
It is impossible to exaggerate the difficulties under which he wrote
his greatest novels. His wife and children were literally starving. He
could not get money, and was continually harassed by creditors. During
part of the time, while writing in the midst of hunger and freezing
cold, he had an epileptic attack every ten days. His comment on all
this is, "I am only preparing to live," which is as heroic as Paul
Jones's shout, "I have not yet begun to fight."
In 1880 a monument to Pushkin was unveiled, and the greatest Russian
authors were invited to speak at the ceremony. This was the occasion
where Turgenev vainly tried to persuade Tolstoi to appear and
participate. Dostoevski paid his youthful debt to the ever living poet
in a magnificent manner.
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